Psychology or the Science of the Soul

In order to better cope with the pressures and stresses of the current day, modern psychology is anxiously seeking to find new therapies to address the increasing disorders within the human psyche. In the process new fields of research, such as humanistic and transpersonal psychology, curiously appear to borrow more and more from the wisdom of the ages. This volume, containing eighteen articles by noteworthy expositors of the perennial philosophy such as Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Frithjof Schuon, presents the spiritual psychology of the wisdom traditions as a much-needed antidote to the current impasse in modern psychology.

Some Endorsements for Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy:

“[Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy] is more than an anthology. It is a wisely crafted collection of classic and contemporary scholarship noting that what many are seeking is what has always been, a perennial philosophy, that remains foundational. As one of the authors, Tage Lindbom, properly notes, ‘Secularization is a fish in troubled waters.’ This book claims the waters and is essential reading for all those who may have forgotten or are simply ignorant of the rich foundation provided by the perennial philosophy.”
—Ralph W. Hood, Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, past president of the Psychology of Religion division of the American Psychological Association, co-founder of The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion and co-author of The Psychology of Religion

“A necessary and bracing critique of the assumptions and limitations of contemporary Western psychology, this generous volume is also a passionate call and learned guide towards a truer perspective that embraces man's spiritual nature.”
—Gabor Maté, M.D., and author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Knowing the nature of the mind is perhaps the most difficult undertaking, especially in today’s world. To comprehend the nature of mind one needs to turn to the domain of religion and spirituality. Yet the truth of the mind and its complexity cannot explicitly be defined in words. Inner or transcendent wisdom sees the mind’s own nature without the duality of the seer. Suchness (tathatā) of mind is only experiential and not expressible. The words used to describe thought are themselves a product of thought, which is conditioned and limited. Thus, differences and contradictions are unavoidable. Therefore, a comparative study of different viewpoints and commentaries is immensely important to awaken the inner intelligence to see the mind as it is. Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy: Studies in Comparative Religion edited by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is an outstanding effort in this direction.”
—Samdhong Rinpoche, former Prime Minister (Kalon Tripa) of the Tibetan Government-in-exile, author of Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World: Tibetan Buddhism and Today’s World

“The rise of psychology has impacted the study and practice of spirituality, the experiences and attitudes relevant to ultimate human values that transcend ordinary behavior. Each chapter of this remarkable book demonstrates this interaction in a unique and provocative way. But rather than using psychology to reduce and ‘psychologize’ spiritual topics, its authors demonstrate how directives from the spiritual traditions can enhance and even illuminate the enduring importance of psychology in the 21st century.”
—Stanley Krippner, Saybrook University, co-author of Spiritual Dimensions of Healing

“The work at hand is a thinking and debating man’s delight. If you have any interest at all in attempting to include an educated and enlightened view of man’s higher functions in your purview of the world, you will learn from and enjoy this collection of essays. If you already have some knowledge in this area, brace yourself: you may see some of your favorites sharply criticized. A thought-provoking work.”
—Bruce W. Scotton, University of California, San Francisco, co-editor of Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology

“This book, superbly edited by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, is a masterful critique of the field of psychology and its loss of the sacred ground in which it once was rooted. It offers depth psychologists an opportunity to contemplate timeless truths echoed through the centuries by perennial philosophers who have always claimed psyche is subordinate to Spirit. Although ignored in depth psychology’s early years due to prejudice and lack of understanding, this is a message today’s psychotherapists must take seriously. Human beings need a deeper and wider transpersonal vision of who and what we are, which the saints and sages of the world’s spiritual traditions have always pointed to. In psychotherapy with a therapist committed to such a vision, patients penetrate into their unconscious depths and not infrequently awaken to the Ground of all Being. Their suffering itself occurred because they had turned away from Spirit. Above all, this volume passionately calls upon depth psychology to remember its origin in the perennial wisdom at the core of the great religions. There is something of a polemic in these pages. It deserves to be considered by depth psychologists of all persuasions.”
—Bryan Wittine, Transpersonal psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst

“This anthology from Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is a must reference for anyone who is interested in psychology and its relationship to spirituality, and in developing an inclusive dialogue between disciplines that favor an integral outlook on the person and his or her potential. Selections in this anthology will inspire us to reexamine the metaphysical underpinnings of psychology, and remind us how important it is to rise above science’s attempt to reduce the human being to an epistemic object.”
—Sangeetha Menon, National Institute of Advanced Studies (Bangalore, India), Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), author of The Beyond Experience: Consciousness in Bhagavad Gita

“This anthology has some of the most discerning essays and reviews on spirituality and psychology, which provide much-needed care and caution to all those engaged in bringing them together or who wish to do so in future. Therefore, it is a must-read for all those who teach, research, consult, or study in such frontier areas as transpersonal psychology, states of consciousness, mind-body relation, holistic health, Indian psychology, and so on. It will be an invaluable textbook for courses in these and other related areas. I congratulate the editor of the book.”
—Kiran Kumar K. Salagame, University of Mysore (India), Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), author of The Psychology of Meditation: A Contextual Approach

“One of the finest collections of essays on the Perennial Philosophy—a must-read for all psychologists who are engaged with spirituality and transpersonal psychology. The essays which critique modern psychology (including transpersonal psychology, and the framework of Carl Jung), in the light of the Perennial Philosophy are a revelation and make compelling reading. The book serves as a corrective to the excesses of modern psychology, and to this end Sotillos has done a commendable job. I for one will include the book in some of the graduate courses that I teach.”
—Suneet Varma, University of Delhi, co-editor of Foundations of Indian Psychology

“To its credit modern science by-and-large is becoming more cognizant of the essential connection between spirituality and psychological health and well-being and most of all its positive implications within the field of psychology. While there is ample data to document this in a plethora of academic journals and books, this new book Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy adds a novel contribution to the dialogue between psychology and spirituality, which captures many nuances that for the most part go unnoticed within these discussions, and last but not least, it provides a keen eye of discernment to understand this intricate relationship on a deeper level that is crucially needed. This work will be a valuable asset to students and long term mental health practitioners and professors alike who seek to better understand the relationship between psychology and spirituality.”
—Harold G. Koenig, Duke University, Director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, co-author of The Handbook of Religion and Health

John Willis’s 1618 Mnemonica, Sive Reminiscendi Ars explores, for the first time, a vivid and unsettling intermingling of the material, quotidian world and the gallery of the imagination.  My aim in this essay is to consider the strangest of Willis's productions, to gauge their distance from those produced by earlier arts of memory, and to suggest that they mark a new uncertainty about the relationship between the faculty of the imagination and the perception of the material world.

Contemporary psychology is in a state of confusion, claims this perennialist author and mental health clinician, because it cannot identify the 'self' or 'the unity of the personality'. This is because it "attempts to study what is beyond its epistemological and ontological scope and trespasses upon the domain of metaphysics". Drawing attention to the materialistic biases in contemporary psychology, which focuses on the empirical ‘self’ and its pathology without the normative criterion of a 'healthy personality', the author contrasts contemporary psychology with traditional pneumatology, which acknowledges the transpersonal Self as the source of normative personality.

In Avicenna’s Nafs there are two investigations that run in parallel from its very beginning: (a) the investigation of the soul as a relational entity, always considered in connection with the body, and (b) that of the human soul in itself. Both investigations aim at ascertaining the existence and the essence of the soul, in relation to the body, of which it is the soul, and in itself respectively. The aim of this contribution is to reconstruct the phases of these investigations, in order to single out the way in which they are mutually related to each other, and to detect what acts as an indicator of the transition from the first, more general investigation to the second, more specific one. In my reconstruction, this role is assigned to the Flying Man experiment. In order to corroborate this interpretation, passages from three other Avicennian works (Ḥikma mašriqiyya or al-Mašriqiyyūn, Kitāb al-Išārāt wa-l-Tanbīhāt, and Risāla Aḍḥawiyya fī l-ma‘ād) are taken into account, since they contain the three other attested formulations of the Flying Man experiment, and an argumentative move similar to the one detectable in the Nafs.

In metaphysics, Avicenna refers to the heaven as animal (ḥayawān), and to its proximate principle of motion as soul (nafs), by using the same terminology used in psychology to refer to sublunary animals and their principle. The strategy behind this approach is to account for a remote phenomenon, i.e. heavenly circular motion, through the account of an analogous but closer and thus more knowable phenomenon, i.e. animal locomotion. Thus, in metaphysics a sort of continuity between sublunary and celestial ‘animals’ seems to be posited: both are defined by means of the same terminology and share some distinctive features. However, in psychology, where this terminology is defined, Avicenna explicitly denies that sublunary and celestial ‘animals’ can be referred to in the very same way, except by equivocation. This position rests on the discontinuity between the sublunary and celestial realm that is posited in psychology.
Given that Avicenna’s attitude towards this issue is not consistent, the aim of this paper is to shed some light on the use of the terms animal and soul in psychology and in metaphysics, in order to ascertain whether they have the same meaning when they are applied to celestial and sublunary entities.

How does Tradition understand the world of modern psychology? Is there a lexicon that can distinguish modern psychology from sacred psychology? This essay approaches the topic through a discussion of the four 'forces' of modern psychology, and their false premises from the perspective of principial psychology.

At the dawn of the so called “Modern Age”, Jesuit Colleges are centres of irradiation of new pedagogical practices, doctrines, and texts that exert a tremendous impact on all the sciences—and all over the world. If some of such centres have been more studied, as it is the case with the famous Roman College, the Parisian one—like many others—has not yet become the object of systematic study concerning the philosophical teachings offered in it. In the last years, I have drafted a list of the unpublished sources that record the philosophical teaching of the professors at Clermont. Focusing on psychology, the scientia de anima, I am currently working on a systematic study of the doctrines of the soul taught by the Clermont professors from its foundation to the beginning of the 17th century. Together with a map of these unpublished sources, I will outline a cartography of some of the recurring topics and trends—authentic topoi—that are to be found in the works of these scholastics. The question lurking in the background is, what were their reasons to assume a common position regarding the structure of the mind and its cognitive acts?

In the opening lines of the Qānūn fī l-ṭibb (Canon of Medicine) Avicenna outlines the epistemological status of medicine: it is a derivative natural science, therefore its philosophical and epistemological underpinnings, that is, the theory and principles of humoral pathology, are given in natural philosophy –the theoretical science to which medicine is said to be subordinated–, and their investigation is declared off-limits to the physician. This statement chimes with what Avicenna says about medicine in his Risāla fī Aqsām al-‘ulūm al-‘aqliyya (Epistle on the Divisions of the Intellectual Sciences).
In providing the theoretical setting of the medical investigation in the first part of the first book of the Qānūn, Avicenna lists the things that the physician must accept on authority, because their existence has been already ascertained elsewhere (i.e. in natural philosophy). Among those things there are the psychic faculties, their existence, their number, and their location. Consequently, in dealing with the diseases related to and affecting the psychic faculties, Avicenna has to assume their ascertainment provided in natural philosophy and, notably, in psychology. Nutrition, and the nutritive soul seem not to escape this paradigm: Avicenna provides a formal account of nutrition in the Kitāb al-nafs (Book of the Soul, i.e. the psychology of the Kitāb al-Šifā’ [Book of the Cure]), and a mechanical account of it in the first book of the Qānūn.
However, is it really indisputable that the mechanical account of nutrition provided in medicine is subordinated to its formal account in natural philosophy? And, more generally, is the treatment of the psychic faculties in the Kitāb al-Nafs the theoretical ground for the medical investigation devoted to them in the Qānūn? A close scrutiny of the text and, in particular, of the passages devoted to nutrition and the nutritive soul, seems to provide a more refined picture: with particular reference to the psychic faculties, medicine seems not to entirely depend on natural philosophy but, rather, to integrate the conclusions of natural philosophy with another theoretical framework, most likely inherited by the previous medical tradition.

The present volume hosts the proceedings of the conference “A Crossroad between East and West: The Latin Medieval Translations of the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ (Book of the Cure) of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna)”, which took place in Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore, on 1-3 July 2015 in the framework of the project “Philosophy on the Border of Civilizations and Intellectual Endeavours: Towards a Critical Edition of the Metaphysics (Ilāhiyyāt of Kitāb al-Šifāʾ) of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)”, financed by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant, 2014-2019, www.avicennaproject.eu). Some additional articles (N. Caminada, A. Astesiano, N. Polloni, I. Panzeca) complement the papers first presented at the conference. The decision to devote a conference expressly to the Latin translations of the various parts of Avicenna’s philosophical masterpiece produced during the Middle Ages, and, now, to publish the papers of the meeting in a self-standing volume that deals comprehensively with the topic – in both cases for the first time, to the best of our knowledge – finds its justification in the necessity of approaching this key event of the Arabic-into-Latin transmission of philosophical culture in a comprehensive rather than piecemeal way.

DOCUMENTI E STUDI SULLA TRADIZIONE FILOSOFICA MEDIEVALE XXVIII, 2017:
AMOS BERTOLACCI, TOMMASO ALPINA, Introduction — FRANÇOISE HUDRY, La traduction latine de la Logica Avicennae et son auteur — SILVIA DI VINCENZO, Is There a versio vulgata of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifāʾ ? On the Hypothesis of a Double Recension of Kitāb al-Madḫal — NICCOLÒ CAMINADA, A Latin Translation ? The Reception of Avicenna in Albert the Great’s De praedicamentis — RICCARDO STROBINO, Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Burhān, II.7 and its Latin Translation by Gundissalinus : Content and Text — GAIA CELLI, The Rhetoric Section of the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ : Hermannus Alemannus’ Latin Translation and the Arabic Witnesses — FRÉDÉRIQUE WOERTHER, Citer/traduire. La traduction arabo-latine de la Rhétorique d’Aristote par Hermann l’Allemand et les citations d’al-Fārābī et Averroès — JULES JANSSENS, The Liber primus naturalium, i.e., the Physics of the Avicenna latinus — ALESSIA ASTESIANO, L’inizio di un movimento nella fisica del continuo : Avicenna lettore di Aristotele (Libro della guarigione, Fisica, III, 6) — CRISTINA CERAMI, The De Caelo et Mundo of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifāʾ : An Overview of its Structure, its Goal and its Polemical Background — SILVIA DI DONATO, Les trois traductions latines de la Météorologie  d’Avicenne : notes pour l’histoire du texte — ELISA RUBINO, The Commentary of Alfred of Shareshill on the pseudo-Aristotelian De mineralibus — TOMMASO ALPINA, Al‐Ǧūzǧānī Insertion of On Cardiac Remedies in Avicenna’s Book of the Soul : the Latin Translation as a Clue to his Editorial Activity on the Book of the Cure ? — AAFKE VAN OPPENRAAY, Avicenna’s Liber de animalibus (‘Abbreviatio Avicennae’). Preliminaries and State of Affairs — RÜDIGER ARNZEN, Double Translations in the Latin Version of the Metaphysics of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifāʾ — ALFONSO QUARTUCCI, Avicenna’s Notion of al-mawḍūʿ al-awwal (‘first subject’) in Ilāhiyyāt, I, 1-2 and its Latin Reception — AMOS BERTOLACCI, The Latin Translation and the Original Version of the Ilāhiyyāt (Science of Divine Things) of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifāʾ — NICOLA POLLONI, Gundissalinus and Avicenna : Some Remarks on an Intricate Philosophical Connection  — IVANA PANZECA, On the Persian Translations of Avicenna’s Ilāhiyyāt — INDICE DEI MANOSCRITTI  — INDICE DEI NOMI